Tim Wigmore works on the Morning Briefing email and was called a "little slave" by the Daily Politics Show. He blogs on British politics, and also contributes to ESPNcricinfo. He tweets @timwig.

Labour is fighting back against Ukip

Ukip has a simple response to Labour's claims to represent the working class. “Don’t make us laugh”, snorts its campaign leaflet in Wythenshawe and Sale East.

Thursday’s by-election here should not be remotely newsworthy. With Labour in opposition, it would normally barely grab the media's attention. This time is different, and Ukip’s emergence is the reason why.

Ukip have attacked all three main parties – plus the Greens – in their campaign. But inside Ukip's by-election HQ, a vacant shop on Sale high street, the leaflet that really catches the eye – and the one that Ukip says has been most effective – is directed at Labour only.

“Meet Labour’s millionaires”, it declares. The modern incarnation of the party is “an elite political club of millionaires who have lost touch with the working class”. Below are 12 culprits singled out, led by Ed “Owns £2.3 m house with mortgage of £400,000” Miliband. The message to Labour, loud and proud, is: watch out, Ukip is coming for you.

That is echoed when I follow one of Ukip’s more famous members on the campaign trail. Neil Hamilton, once a Conservative MP for neighbouring Tatton and now a deputy chairman of Ukip, is canvassing for Ukip's candidate John Bickley. The “Labour millionaires” campaign has exposed the reality of Labour’s hypocrisy on this issue, he says. "They’re always talking about the rich tax-dodgers. Well what about the property transactions that the Labour leadership has engaged in? The lifestyle of people like Ed Balls and Miliband is a million light-years away from what you see on the Wynthenshawe estate.”

Whether Mr Hamilton is best placed to make this point on the doorstep is unclear. After one woman seems less than enthused by his presence, he explains: “If they don't want to talk, there’s no point in trying to worm it out of them. You can normally tell by the twinkle in the eye if it’s worth persevering.” After knocking on a few more doors – most people aren't yet back from work – Mr Hamilton and his wife Christine return to Ukip HQ for another interview.

“We are not contemplating coming in third – we are definitely going to be the challengers to Labour in one of their safest seats.” Mr Hamilton's confidence doesn't seem misplaced. A poll by Lord Ashcroft last week had Ukip squeezing the Conservatives into third place. And Ukip has made by-elections surges into an art form: at Eastleigh last year, 31 per cent of those who plumped for purple made up their minds in the last week, including 18 per cent who decided on polling day. Many of those who campaigned then are in Wythenshawe and Sale East now as grizzled campaigning veterans.

Labour is taking the attack to Ukip too

Yet the tight race that the media yearn for has not materialised. Lord Ashcroft’s poll gave Labour a whooping 46-point lead. While Labour expects it to be a little closer on the day, Ukip faces a new challenge in its history: trying to downplay expectations. Says Mr Hamilton: "We've now got to the stage where the expectations of Ukip are so great that if we don't exceed them then that can be presented as a bit of a failure." Dreams of giving Labour a proper fright have evaporated; Ukip would now be happy with 20 per cent.

Labour has much to fear from Ukip. As I have argued before, the risk is that Ukip unites the anti-Labour vote. Because the Conservatives and Lib Dems are so toxic in the region, and because Ukip engages with non-voters, it could have a higher ceiling of support in much of the urban North.

There is little doubt that Labour has been complacent in the past – “The Left is often blind to Ukip”, one shadow cabinet member admitted to me last month. Belatedly, that could be changing. Just yesterday, Douglas Alexander revealed that Labour has created an attack team to focus on Ukip. For a safe seat, Labour MPs have been unusually assiduous in campaigning in Wythenshawe and Sale East. Over 100 of the party’s MPs have signed their names at Labour’s campaign HQ. Ed Miliband, Ed Balls, Andy Burnham and Rachel Reeves are among those who have visited; on the day I'm in town, Yvette Cooper is speaking about crime.

Labour's pamphlets are another sign of how seriously it is taking Ukip. It has produced two for this by-election – and both contain attacks on Ukip. The first has “Five reasons why Ukip aren’t the answer”. The number one reason is that “Nigel Farage says he is ‘the only politician keeping Thatcherism alive’.” It's a sign that Labour is developing, as MP John Mann has advocated, the strategy of trying to connect Mr Farage to Margaret Thatcher at every opportunity.

In Labour’s other pamphlet the attention given to Ukip is upgraded from a corner to a full half page, with press cuttings attacking its candidate John Bickley. To Neil Hamilton, this is proof of how far Ukip has come: “all Labour's negative campaigning is directed at us, which is great.” The Conservatives and Liberal Democrats – who won 48 per cent of the vote between them in the seat during the general election – are reduced to ghosts at the by-election feast. While I notice perhaps 10 posters apiece for Ukip and Labour, as well as campaigners for both parties, support for the Coalition partners seems non-existent.

Yet Wythenshawe and Sale East is also reminding Ukip how far it has to come. While Ukip should increase the 3.4 per cent of the vote it got in 2010 by at least five times, its vote may rise by less than the fall in the vote for the Coalition parties.

“They’ve misunderstood the constituency”, one Labour MP in a nearby seat tells me. “Their understanding of working-class voters is not right. They’re a bit clichéd in what they’ve put out.”

Labour has run a campaign seeking to mesh local and national issues. Responding to the concerns on the doorstep, Labour has switched its attention from general cuts to the state of Wythenshawe hospital, which is now the centrepiece of its campaign. Yet Ukip has barely mentioned the hospital in its campaign leaflets. Even with an amiable local candidate in John Bickley, an absence of councillors makes it hard to convince voters that Ukip has the answers. And it's hard to imagine too many swing voters getting through the party's newsletter "Ukip News", densely packed and in tiny font. Those who do may not be impressed by a headline on the front – "City under EU attack". To quote Neil Hamilton, "I wouldn't be at all surprised if the protest vote that comes to Ukip is largely from the Tories." The assault on Labour may have to wait for another day.

These difficulties are hardly surprising. While Labour has built up a formidable electioneering machine over decades, Ukip is effectively starting one from scratch. “They breeze into a constituency where they’ve got no established relationships, no councillors, no organisation”, Labour’s candidate Mike Kane tells me. “Then they will breeze out next week.” It’s a reminder that, for all the focus on the European elections, Ukip’s performance in the local elections may be a better gauge of its prospects of winning seats in 2015.

The party's demeanour during the campaign has also been questioned. A pensioner, Irene Lawrence, is among those who have complained that Ukip have used their photos without permission in a leaflet, after being assured they were being taken for record purposes only. She says that Ukip candidate John Bickley has graciously apologised, but blames "the tw*ts in the back offices who thought they could get away with it". It's an incident that encapsulates Ukip's struggle to professionalise its electioneering operation. I also encounter complaints, which Ukip denies, that Ukip stakes have been put into people's gardens without their permission. For their part, Ukip complain that Labour activists have been shouting obscenities at Ukip supporters. The circumstances of the by-election, following the sudden death of Paul Goggins, may have taken some of the sting out of the campaign, but there's enough bubbling under the surface to hint at the vicious scraps in store when Ukip goes up against Labour in its main target seats.

Opposite Sale tram station is a pub called “The King’s Ransom”. I hear that someone has bet one – £10,000 to be exact – on Labour retaining the constituency, even at odds of 33-1 on. They've since got shorter still, and it’s not hard to see why.

Wythenshawe and Sale East was never going to be an easy fight for Ukip. Mr Goggins was admired by voters of all parties and the nature of a quick campaign with a high number of postal votes has worked to squeeze the Ukip vote. The seat’s profile is also younger and less middle-class than Ukip's top targets. The constituency doesn’t even feature in the top 200 most “Ukip attractive” seats in the forthcoming book by Rob Ford and Matt Goodwin.

So a Ukip result of around 20 per cent, while lacking the wow factor of previous by-elections, will offer confirmation that the party is here to stay. With the Tories and Lib Dems both damaged, perhaps fatally in the North, “the available room in the system needs to go somewhere and that’ll go to Ukip”, as a Labour MP puts is. “Clearly something unique is happening in the history of Ukip.”

Yet Labour is now taking the attack to Ukip in the North; it is no longer bleeding voters in silence. It may still be losing votes to Ukip in its Northern heartlands, but it is no longer in denial about what's happening.